Pax Clevelandia
by Nyah
Summary: Cleveland, several years after the collapse of the Sunnydale Hellmouth. Years later, there's time for hot baths and jokes that never used to be funny. Like death and souls. Spike & Buffy.


**Time line: **Several years post-Buffy series finale.

**Spoilers: **Through finales of BtVS and AtS I suppose

**Genre:** Humor a bit. And romance isn;t the right word but there's a sort of love here I think.

**Note: **So I may be playing the frog in boiling water with this fandom. But the lucky frog that jumps out, not the slow cooker. I began "Ruby Red" (my first Buffy fic) having seen very few Buffy episodes and I've seen a few more now and I must say that Buffy&Spike are very stressful entities. Very. So I might be high-tailing it out of this fandom but, in the mean time, I wrote something relaxed. Imagine that.

**Pax Clevelandia**

I'm still young enough to blame most of the wrinkles on the bath water. But those tiny ones starting at the corners of my eyes, those are mine.

I lean back into one the corners of the tub that's intended for just such an activity, giving my spine a good stretch and flex. My vertebrae pop in an almost friendly way, one by one, settling back into the right nooks and crannies of each other . And now I want an english muffin. But not quite enough to get out of the bath.

I sigh into the blanket of bubbles, carving out a little cove in front of my chin and sinking a little further into the hot water. Eyes closed, I think that all the insane, hanging-on-by-the-fingernails days I'd spent as the Slayer might have been just a little more bearable if I'd made time for more hot baths.

The door hinges squeak and my blanket of bubbles sloshes gently with the footsteps of the person entering the room. No knock. Usually that would mean Dawn, dropping by from college unannounced, but I know different since I have another sense to go by. I may not be _the_ Slayer anymore but I still am _a _Slayer. Yep, these days it's all about the articles. Grammar turned out to be important. Who knew?

My extra sense is not something that's easy to describe. Since it's demons I'm sensing, it's like a sense gone wrong, I guess. Like hearing the scent of a burning match or tasting an itch.

Usually it's like that anyway. With this particular demon it's a little different. It's like … I don't know … smelling the sound of the ocean maybe. Sometimes you forget that's not how sounds are supposed to work. Or maybe that's a bad comparison. It's been a while since I've heard the ocean.

We're both quiet for a while, I, reveling in the perfect temperature of my bath water, he, sniffing pointedly at my choice of candles. Eventually, I hear his boots on the tile again since, soul or no soul, he never remembers to take them off in my house.

The soul. For a while it was one of those jokes that really isn't funny. But it makes me smile now in that way that hindsight can. You know, you look back and you can smile or you can cry and if you've got the choice, what the hell, right?

Xander's still not convinced. But he's off building things and dabbling in architecture (off the books) and neither his life nor the rest of our lives are really very affected by him being unconvinced. It's expected. Almost comforting. He's the one that reminds us that things shouldn't be like this and that's exactly how we're used to them.

Giles was once very solidly, or _staunchly_ because he's Giles, in the unconvinced camp too. But years passed without much fuel to feed that particular fire. Once, a year or so back, he mumbled something about the worthiness of the journey and how few finite boundaries life really sets and a lot more that sounded like a graduation speech but really meant he was declaring himself neutral on the issue of souls.

I still thought it was a pretty wussy stance since the whole soul thing turned out to be a big, fat McGuffin. See, Spike had died. Again. In L.A. And it didn't take any better that time than it had in Sunnydale. Only this time he came back sans soul. Maybe he'd sold it to some collector in limbo for another pass back to life. I never asked because the thing was, he wasn't, isn't, any different. Except maybe a little less crazy.

Joke's on us.

I hear him walk over to the door and and the hinges screech as he pulls it back and forth. Little puffs of cold air shift my bubbles around and I sit up slowly, annoyed that I have to work up the energy to be annoyed. "What are you doing?"

He keeps at it with the door but thankfully the hinges are a little quieter with each swing. When the sound finally fades altogether, he looks at the door like it's wronged him personally. "Thing was screamin' like it was being bloody tortured," he says and holds up my shampoo which he's smeared on the hinges because I guess it has magical de-squeaking powers. "Harris would have had a conniption if he ever heard that."

He perches on the edge of the counter, balancing so he doesn't slide into the sink. "You look like you've been thinkin' hard," he says, eyes scanning my face. He's not leering. There's quite a lot of room in the tub but he doesn't even measure the space with his eyes, doesn't take in the fact that he'd fit just fine. _That_ was part of who we used to be and it was never really love. So maybe some things have changed.

"Opposite," I said. "I'm taking a break from thinking. School overload. I'm too old for cramming." I pause and reconsider. "I was thinking about wrinkles."

"Wrinkles?"

"Yeah. I've got little ones kind of starting by my eyes." I scoop up a careless handful of the melting bubbles. "I was at the store the other day and I seriously considered shop lifting some anti-aging crèam because I didn't want to actually buy it. Like a … like a fourteen-year-old boy stealing condoms or something."

"You know, I don't understand that at all," Spike replies with grave seriousness. "I mean you go to a 7-11 and grab a pack of the things. And what's the problem? The clerks smirks at you? You're goin' off for a shag, he's workin' at the bloody 7-11. Humans." He's staring straight ahead like he's really thinking it over. "Now wrinkle cream, can see how you wouldn't want to pick that up. It's like taunting demons everywhere. 'Look at me, I'm the Slayer, still alive and getting wrinkly because you're just absolute rubbish at being evil!' Can't think of a better way to make us all want to kill you even more, in fact."

I laugh and the whole bubbly surface of the bath starts sloshing.

"Oh come on!" Spike says in that tone he gets when he's accidentally been funny. "Aren't you wrinkly enough? Bath's only going to make it worse."

I don't have much time to pretend at offense before he's tossed my towel at my head with excellent accuracy so I have to raise an arm up out of my glorious hot water to deflect and catch it.

"Hellmouth. Patrol. Chop chop."

A few minutes later, dressed and damp-haired, I find him waiting in the kitchen. "Maybe I should take this wrinkle thing more seriously," he says. "You are the oldest Slayer in history. Could be you're slowin' up. Might get one of us killed."

"Yeah," I reply, winding a scarf around my neck. "It might even stick this time."

It's kind of twisted as jokes go but we've been way more twisted and earned our way back. So he chuckles and I agree.

"It'd be a bit anticlimactic though," he says, stepping out into the cold Ohio night. "At this point I don't think we can settle for less than death by apocalypse."

"Yeah," I agree, falling into step on his right because he's left-handed and this is how we work. "And a real one." I put on my best Spike impression. "Not one of these namby-pamby, averted at the last minute ones."

He looks at me sideways, impressed that I've adopted a little of his gallows humor.

When you're not supposed to live past twenty-five, everything seems like the end of the world. If you make past that expiration date, I figure nothing, end of the world included, is quite what it's cracked up to be.

"C'mon. Time's a wastin'. Let's go kill someone," he says.

"_Spike_."

"Thing! I meant some_thing_."

End


End file.
